… Exercise

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This is a collection of our thoughts on moving, changing, questioning, and doing different. Essaying about the world within and around us. An intimate walk into a discomforting landscape of our thoughts, feelings and doings. Carefully touching on what collaboration is to us, we opened a door to becomings and you are welcome to peek into it.

Тake a walk and click through our experience and glimpse into the scenes we share.

Joana Quiroga &
Sunčica Pasuljević Kandić

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…  Exercise in healing

How can we escape the rationalization through which we explain and navigate this world that got us here, Brădet… Intersecţia? How can we try to communicate between us and the land? Can we find ways to heal and move forward? And how do we do that collectively? ”These were some of the many questions we had in mind.

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I didn’t know what it would be like when we talked about working together. Even more in a place unknown to both of us. I knew Sunčica would bring up many questions, I knew my friend was not okay. What I maybe hadn’t worried so much was that the one who wasn’t doing well too was me.

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Each walk is the start of a new journey. We took a walk following Christina’s footsteps. She kindly took her Sunday to show us around, city girls, with wild pretensions. We are making our way through the wild grass observing, and taking just a tiny bit of her knowledge. Each plant had something to say. But what were they saying? Understanding the fields, woods and us in between it all. Christina seemed to get it.

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Yellow flowers are picked through the wild grass. It is “Sunătoare”, Hypericum perforatum – St. John’s Wort, Erva de São-João, Кантарион. The bouquet formed in her hands makes Sunătoare take over the view of the landscape. It made so much sense. And then we reminded ourselves that we started this journey not just by walking into the “wild”… but into ourselves. Trying to navigate the landscape of our beings and our connections. What is it that brings the two of us together? What this place opens in us?

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I remembered that when I was little a wasp stung me. My dad told me to take a stone that draws my attention and put it on the place of the sting. “When it gets warm, place it back exactly as you found it, so that the healing can be completed”, he taught me. I remember being confused, thinking how can that help me, stone is no medicine. I wondered, why does it have to be placed at the same spot, exactly as it was found? Even then, my rationalization took over as it usually does. But rationalization often messes with how we sense the world. In so many ways what we feel and what we take from the world can’t be rationalized. It is a sensation, an emotion, a feeling that defies explanation. In this trial of translation, of rationalization we lose so much that everything becomes something else. Even things with the size of a bear, or a teardrop.

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I remember that nothing worked so fast and completely as the little stone healing moment. Healing is an unknown process and often takes the form of unexplainable situations and feelings. It is a road that you take and try to trust in it, letting go of all known.

And we found out that almost everything that we had to do here had to do with that. A way to question the known, exiting our comfort zones, to heal. We had to exercise. No questions, no forms, no expectations of explanations to satisfy.

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We took the path of the river going in between the woods and the field to try and exercise this healing of ourselves and the land we became part of. To take a step, silly and magical, trying to ignore that so revered and controlling rationalization. We placed the stones from the river at the intersection of the field and the woods, car(ry)ing our feelings and intentions towards the land and ourselves. We do not have the solutions and we do not know the exact way how to navigate our inner landscape. All we can do is try. So we exercise stepping out, leaving room for what might come.


Where do we go from here? We don’t know
, but that is ok.

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The aftermath and traces of the unknown!